This little sandwich board sign has brought passers-by into the Frame House Gallery on Cooper Road in Montgomery, Ohio, just to shake their hands, said co-owner Kathy Munafo. She and her husband, Greg Munafo, DID build this business over 28 years, despite Obama's assertion otherwise.
Obama believes that nobody built anything. After all, not only did he never build so much as a birdhouse, he got a Nobel Prize just for being himself. Since he had not then, and still has not, accomplished much, he got the prize simply for being elected. The prize really should have gone to the American electorate.
Kathy Munafo mentioned Chris McMurray of Radford, Virginia. Proprietor of his new doughnut shop, Crumb and Get It, Murray said no when Joe Biden's staff asked if Biden could visit the bakery for a photo op.
Munafo also said that when the streets were paved, it was our tax money that paid for them.
She might have added that the first streets in Montgomery were not likely to have been paid for with taxes. When settlers from the east first arrived in 1795, they lived in lean-tos the first winter. When roads were built, they built them with their own hands, as well as their houses, churches, stores, and stables.
The question of who builds businesses, or towns, is really a philosophical one. If it's not the owner or founder, who came up with the idea? And who had a similar idea before that? If you have done the physical labor alone, well, that's just the grunt work. So if you identify the person who got the idea for a business, it can't be an original idea, and if the idea is complex, it relies on a complex infrastructure, which you did not build. This is like defining the origin of the universe: ultimately you come to a Prime Mover. That wouldn't fit Obama's ideology either; at least, that's not what he was talking about when he said "You didn't build that."
But every new creation needs an individual to conceive the plan, decide to act, and do the work.
Obama doesn't have this American heritage in his blood or in his mind. His father was not descended from slaves, who helped build the country, and he didn't grow up here so he didn't absorb our history and ethos. His accomplishment of becoming president almost seems accidental. He carries the aura of an opportunist more than a doer.
Obama's career and Obama himself seem to have been built by someone else.
What is his motive in denigrating the spirit of American enterprise?
Weakening businesses and individuals means strengthening government, thus justifying more taxes and increased controls on business and on people.
The American tradition and spirit of creativity combined with work can't be swept away by a politician's words, but they can be damaged by onerous laws.
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